I hate apple (the corporation) because it seems their ethics are non-existent

Really? They seem to perform positive ethical acts quite regularly. Supporting gay rights. Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad. Making their products environmentally friendly. Improving the privacy of their users. Why do you think their ethics are non-existent?

Market share isn't the important factor though. iPhone sales have grown every year. Apple's profits have grown every year. They are the most profitable phone vendor by a long way. If that's failing, I'd love to fail as hard as Apple are.

Now on a mobile phone this would be a non-issue as the NFC could be configured to only respond under certain circumstances, e.g. entering a PIN number.

It's a safe bet that any new iPhones will have the fingerprint scanner built in that can be used for this purpose.

That's just 4chan rumours at the moment. No point in taking them seriously unless there's confirmation.

This is actually really interesting technical problem that the Tor and Debian people have spent some time working on. In practice, with most compilers today, if you compile a program twice you get different binaries. There are a variety of reasons for this, from embedded time stamps to non-deterministic shared library reference ordering to embedding the host name of the build machine.

Here's the Debian project's wiki page on the problem that goes into much more detail:
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Given the nature of the mission and power source (multi-year if not multi-decade operation on another planet with no hope of human intervention if something should go wrong)

Curiosity was intended to last two years, it's been going for almost three. It wasn't intended to last this long, and it definitely wasn't intended to operate for decades.

Yes, thanks for the reminder!

iOS seems to have been last to join the flat look crowd.

It's not really accurate to say that iOS 7's design is flat. It actually has more depth than the earlier design, it's just that the individual items in each layer are flat.

So, for example, the Apple application's icons on the home screen are flat, but they are floating over a parallax background that gives the feeling of depth. The buttons in the control centre are flat, but the translucent background of the control centre gives the impression that it's sitting on top of the home screen.

They even spell it out explicitly on their website when they talk about iOS 7's design:

Distinct and functional layers help create depth and establish hierarchy and order. The use of translucency provides a sense of context and place.

Isn't there a short story about a songwriter who kills himself after losing a court case for plagiarism because there aren't any original melodies left?

And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.

I don't think malware is particularly worrisome in the average user's mind. I think it's more about quality.

Speaking as an application developer, the vast majority of times I've had to say to clients "Apple won't allow that", it's been something that is self-serving and user-unfriendly if not downright abusive. Apple serve as a convenient foil for developers who care about users and stop developers who don't care from going too far.

As a developer, I know first hand how frustrating it is to have a great idea for something that Apple simply won't allow, but at the same time, I frequently see the benefit its policies bring to end users.

For instance, just the other day I saw a developer complain that a client wanted to force users to enter their personal information (e.g. age) before they could use the application, so that they could use it for marketing. Simple solution: Apple don't allow that. But Google does. How do you think policies like that are reflected in the average application quality?

Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6

Not really. The only real difference between 6 and 7 from a CSS perspective was a few extra selectors and bug fixes. The real improvements came with version 8, which finally had full support for CSS 2.

Or which happens to be a valid image but has the same hash.

This is extremely unlikely. The whole point of hashes is that they collide as infrequently as possible.

So they got the warrant based on google reading his email?

He is a convicted child abuser who had a third party service provider independently notify the police that he was sending child pornography by email. Are you arguing that a judge shouldn't grant a search warrant under those circumstances?

Guess all the cops need for a warrant is for some throwaway email address to send a pic to your account.

Listen, if somebody tells you that you're saying dumb things because you didn't read the article, don't just say more dumb things without reading the article. The article clearly points out that Google detected it in an email he was sending, not receiving.

I've found it funny when I've made arguments about Google's ad scanning being something I didn't like, and people always came back with "but it's 100% automated and completely anonymous - no human ever looks at your mail".

I think that argument just got settled with this story - and I won.

No you didn't. If you had bothered to read the article, you would have seen that they detect things like this by using image hashing. It's an automatic process - unless you happen to be passing around images that are identical to known images of child pornography, at which point of course humans will get involved.

I really need to know more about whether this email triggered a thorough and careful investigation that led to the arrest of the person, or if the email WAS the trigger for his arrest.

Well, if you really need to know, then you could always read the article. It specifically states that he was arrested after police found other suspicious images on his computer (after obtaining a search warrant), and that he's a registered sex offender. Chances of this being a mistake are practically nil. All indications are that both Google and the police did their job properly, with judicial oversight.

Love how you just can take a single message, completely out of context, quote a bunch of text which is perfectly true, and claim it says anything about your use case.

It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.

Your bullshit is old, has been debunked multiple times over

How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?

nothing but hot air from the camp of the other, abandoned desktop

Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.

KDE 4.0 was pretty much the same way. The developers proclaimed quite loudly that it was not meant for everyday desktop use. A few Linux distributions took software that they were clearly told was not ready for end users and gave it to end users.

There wasn't a single hint of this in the official release announcement and they were pushing it like crazy to end-users. Quote:

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes.

The idea that KDE 4.0 wasn't intended for end-users and that the developers were clear about this was just an excuse they fell back on when it became apparent 4.0 was a miserable failure in the eyes of end-users.

The cause of the problem was a piss-poor attitude towards release management compounded with a complete inability to take responsibility for their choices. Yes, I'm aware of all the excuses, but they don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Read that press release. Can you honestly say that's warning non-developers to stay away?